


Mischief

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Depression, F/M, M/M, Nogitsune, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 03:24:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10913328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: Amid danger and depression, self-denial and self-depreciation, two people realize that they fit together better broken than they ever would have whole.





	Mischief

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what this is anymore. It changed halfway through, and I just sort of let it.

Mischief

Derek was burned into his skin from birth, and while it wasn’t necessarily a common name, it wasn’t uncommon, not in the ways that some were. The first Derek he met was a soft smiling child in kindergarten, and while the boy’s wrist didn’t say Mieczyslaw, they pretended. They pretended until the first grade, when Mikel moved into town. Mieczyslaw had smiled happily and wholeheartedly, and had gone about his life. 

In second grade, someone wrote a bastardization of his name on their wrist in Sharpie marker and had gone on lamenting how they’d rather be dead than saddled with Mieczyslaw Stilinski of all people. Stiles went to school the next day, a thick leather band on his own wrist and a note from his mother about the request to use his chosen pseudonym. 

It took the better part of second and third and fourth grade, but by the time he went back for the fifth, no one—not even Scott—remembered Mieczyslaw Stilinski and Stiles became synonymous with mischief. 

#

Mieczyslaw was Polish. According to three internet baby name sites and one little old Polish woman at the corner deli, it meant something along the lines of sword of glory, and Derek? He kind of liked the sound of that. 

The name was tattooed on his skin, and as he spent lazy Sunday mornings staring down at the tanned expanse of his wrist, it was tattooed on his heart. Mieczyslaw, he imagined, would be an alpha, strong and fierce and perfect in his wrath. Derek would be his left hand, like Peter was to Taliah. 

Except, as he grew older, Mieczyslaw never came to visit his pack. Paige was sweet and soft, and then Kate was everything he wanted his soulmark to be. Fire and fear and hatred burned everything out of him, and in the end, Derek Hale took a blowtorch to his wrist outside of New York City. The skin came back perfect and unblemished by scar or name.

As the years went by and as old hurts were bathed with the salve of time, Mieczyslaw was gone from his skin, and no one—not even Laura—remembered Meiczyslaw, the sword of glory. 

#

When Stiles met Derek Hale, he considered, for just a moment or two, if that was his Derek, the name beneath his wrist cuff. He had met a handful of Dereks over the course of his life, but none of them had been his, not in the way a soulmark was supposed to be. He stopped looking sometime around freshman year, and for the last few months, he had been actively avoiding thinking about his soulmate. 

Through Peter Hale and Kate Argent and the Epic Disney Love Story ™ that had become his best friend’s life, he’d forgotten that the leather cuff wasn’t actually a part of his body. He’d forgotten until a basement and an old man reminded him. 

The rounded end of a cane came down on the small of his back where he hung by his wrists in the middle of the basement. A fierce, pained thing clawed its way past his throat, and to his surprise, it came out as a snarl instead of a scream. 

“You’ve spent too long with wolves, boy,” Gerard said.

The cool press of the cane beneath his chin forced Stiles’s head backward, exposing his neck. Gerard liked looking at the damage he’d caused, at the pain in his face. He’d done the same thing to Erica and Boyd, who were snarling weakly from where they were chained against an electrified fence. 

“What can I say?” Stiles asked, breathless from the broken ribs. “I prefer their company to humans. Less likely to bite for no reason.” 

The cane slammed into his—thankfully on the opposite side of those already broken—and he buckled, chest curling downward as far as he could. His feet left the ground, curling up, and he hung there a brief second, suspended by the strength in his arms and the taught pain in his muscles. 

“Where is the alpha hiding?” Gerard asked while Stiles was still curled in on himself. He braced against his left side as he came down, using the leather cuff as a cushion to support his weight. Derek the name throbbed beneath the cuff, demanding and fierce and Stiles knew. 

Mieczyslaw might not be inked into Derek Hale’s wrist, but Derek? He was Stiles’s Derek, and the pain and the reality of it was settling. 

He squared his jaw, brought his head up, bared his teeth. The cane came down again and again until the old man’s arms shook with exertion and he needed it once again to remain upright. Blood in his teeth and a thrill in his veins he had never felt, Stiles threw his head back and howled. The sound was an odd mix of laughter and pain, even to his own ears, and the wild edge to it scared the old man enough that he left the basement, giving him a hard blow with the cane on his way through. 

“Stiles?” Erica called after the door had shut. Her voice was strain and hurt, nearly muffled by the continued jarring laughter that had quieted but not slowed. 

“Stiles!” Boyd shouted, louder despite the current in his blood. 

“I’m going to kill him,” Stiles said on a breathless laugh. “I’m going to take that cane and I’m going to drive it right through his chest.” Another little chuckle escaped him, and he spat blood out onto the cement floor. Wolves didn’t lament their pain while there was still danger, and neither would he. 

“We’ve got to get out before we can do anything,” Boyd said, ever the voice of reason.

Stiles nodded, considered his wrists for a moment, and saw the opening. The leather cuff came down over the top of his hand, securing over the base of his thumb to keep it from slipping. It was a classic mark cover, nearly a quarter of an inch thick, and Gerard, the lazy bastard that he was, hadn’t thought to take it off before tightening the cuffs around his wrists. 

Stiles huffed out a breath, shimmied his arms up in the cuffs as far as they would go, and deftly worked the binding loose from over his thumb, pulling it backward and down, inching the cuff up as far as it would go before unsnapping that as well. It fell to the floor, and the sound of the leather on cement was deafening in the silence of the basement. 

“That’s my Batman,” Erica said, voice strained but affectionate. He spared her a smile before trying to pull his hand through. It was still too tight, a space millimeter more and he might have slipped out of the cuff. Horseshoes. Hand grenades. 

“This is going to hurt,” he said, and if the half-crazed laughter ever left his voice again, he would be shocked. 

Before either wolf could ask, he was tearing himself downward, putting all of his weight on the loosened cuff, muffling his pain in his bicep and he ripped and tore and blood came running down from his hand and wrist, slicking the way and painting his bared arms in rivulets of red. 

Finally, his hand came loose, freed with the slick of blood. He fell to his knees, the handcuff ricocheting up and over the bar it had been looped across as he did so. His wrist and hand bled freely, and he stared at it a moment, at the torn flesh and the name that would never again read as it once had. The top half of the ‘D’ and ‘k’ were torn away completely leaving only the bottom of bother with ‘ere’ in the middle, the edges of those marred here and there. 

“Stiles,” Erica whispered, and he glanced up to meet her eyes, wide and shot through with something Stiles didn’t want to admit was pity. “We can get it fixed, get it put back right.” Soulmarks were important to most people, personal and perfect and theirs. Stiles looked down at the destroyed mess of Derek’s name, and he smiled. It felt more real that way. 

#

In the end, Stiles didn’t kill Gerard Argent. In the end, he helped Erica and Boyd from the basement and called Derek. The wolf pulled up in front of the Argent house in a fury of spinning tires and flying gravel. He stared at Stiles a long moment, the bruising and the blood, and he opened his mouth to speak as Erica and Boyd climbed in the back, nursing their hurts. 

“Go. I can’t explain two tortured teens that don’t look the part.” 

“You’re alright?” 

“Shiney,” Stiles said with a nod. It might have been more convincing if he wasn’t using the mailbox to keep upright. The sound of sirens on the breeze put an urgency into Derek’s hesitance, and he nodded. The Camaro peeled off of the road outside of the Argent home, and Stiles slumped down against the wooden base of the mailbox. Sometimes, he loved being the Sheriff’s kid. 

#

“—tore his own mark off to get us out. I’m not leaving.” 

The voice was higher pitched than it should have been, and it made his head throb, but it was Erica, so he cracked an eye open and tried to see past the brightness of the hospital lights and the apparent swelling in his eyelid. 

“Catwoman?” he asked, and his voice was hoarse and cracking. 

“Hey, Batman,” she said, voice soft and honeyed. Her hand gripped his, careful of the bandaging, butterfly light and careful. “It’s about time you woke up.” 

“Tired,” he said, and he realized he was. Syrup was in his mind, cement in his limbs, and the sudden realization that he was drugged in a hospital bed struck him. He pushed himself upright against the headboard, careful of the ache in his side and the searing pain in his wrist. It hurt more now than it had in the basement. 

“Gerard?”

“In custody.” Boyd stood in the corner of the room, eyes wide and hands splayed at his sides as though he wasn’t sure what to do with them. “You...they found you passed out on the lawn. You’ve had three transfusions.” 

“Lucky day,” Stiles said, considering the darkness outside the window. “It’s after hours.” 

“Only if they catch us.” 

“How did you even—”

“Honestly, Batman, it’s like you didn’t even consider the window.” 

Outside the window, Stiles could see the tops of the trees lining the hospital drive. He had to have at least been on the third floor. There really was no stopping werewolves. 

“Gerard’s being charged with kidnapping and assault,” Boyd supplied. He hesitated a moment before he sat down at the foot of the bed. “Your dad was here until a little while ago. Derek took him—” 

“Derek?” Stiles asked. “Why was Derek here? Why are you here?” The questions tumbled past his mind. If the wolves were there, it was clear they knew he was here. If they admitted to knowing he’d been taken off of the Argent lawn, they had to admit to being there. They couldn’t be—

“Calm down. Derek was picking up some of his uncle’s effects after hours from the nursing home across from the emergency department. When he saw John run in, he thought he would see what he could do, show his support for the local police department. We just so happened to be with him.” 

Stiles raised an eyebrow as far as it would go despite the cut through it pulling dangerously. 

“And you were with Derek Hale because…” 

“Derek helps me with my Physics,” Boyd said, pointing to a backpack across the way for emphasis. “We were leaving the library, and Derek asked if I would mind an extra stop before going home. Erica, being my girlfriend, doesn’t like it when I have to study alone. She’s very supportive that way.” 

“Very,” Stiles agreed. The drugs in his system made his mind wander, and it didn’t take him but a half hearted protest about the holes in their alibi before he’d accepted it and moved on. 

“I’m alright. You don’t need to—”

“You tore your mark off,” Erica said again. “You tore your soulmate’s name in half to get us out of there. I’m not leaving. Boyd isn’t leaving. Derek isn’t leaving, and your father sure as hell—”

“Isn’t leaving,” John said from the doorway. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at the two kids in the room but didn’t comment as he stepped through. Derek came in behind him, trying to look to all the world like an innocent lending his support. The carefully open face was disturbing on the werewolf. “How you doing, kid?”

“Alright,” Stiles said, trying to look the part. His father would worry if he knew how much his ribs ached each time he took a breath. 

“Nice try,” John said, removing Erica’s purse from a hospital chair and tugging it over to his bedside. His booted feet found an empty place on the bed, and he sagged into the chair like an old friend. It probably was. Stiles didn’t want to process that. 

“A little more feeling next time?” Stiles asked, smiling when John nodded. The smile cracked and shattered on his lips, and he was chuckling again, that broken little chuckle that stole his breath and made his body sing in agony. Familiar, pained laughter that wouldn’t stop bubbling past his lips. 

“Hey,” a voice said, slicing through the pain and gasps of humor. A soothing wave of something trickled through his body, easing his pains and making the anxious bubble of something in his chest ease. “You’re alright.” 

There was a hand against his shoulder, and that hand, that strong, blank wrist, was a tether. He clasped his fingers around that wrist, and the cool chill of painlessness put him under. 

#

He woke to Scott’s puppy dog face standing vigil over his bedside. 

“I am so sorry. I didn’t notice you weren’t there, and then I thought—” 

“Scotty,” Stiles managed, voice muzzy and head spinning. “I’ll forgive you anything if you shut up and get me some water.” 

Scott was always easy to fool, easy to lead if you had something he wanted. Scott would take a running leap off a cliff if you only held something shiney out a few feet. Stiles was more than willing to watch him fall this time. Aspirin and a cup of hospital water later, he was chattering away about the lacrosse game, about classes, about Finstock and Greenberg. Stiles let him go. 

“Allison called me this morning, man. She actually called me and I—”

“Scott,” Stiles said, sharp and loud. “I spent a night being tortured in the Argent’s basement. Can we not?” 

The puppy dog exuberance fell, replaced with a flickering kaleidoscope of emotions that had Stiles praying the kid never played poker. 

“Allison wasn’t there when you—” 

“No, but she sure as hell helped strap Erica and Boyd in and leave them there.” 

See, the thing was? Everyone assumed that Stiles was jealous of Allison, that he automatically didn’t like her because she swooped in and stole the attention of his best friend, but if he was being honest? If Stiles scraped up what was left of his self awareness and was truly honest with himself? He didn’t give a fuck about that. Scott could go off and have happy-go-lucky time playing hide the pickle all he wanted and Stiles? He was a-o-fucking-kay with that. 

Allison was beautiful. She was intelligent. She was strong and quick witted and dangerous, and she had to be all of those things, because she was dating a werewolf and her parents were hunters. Stiles didn’t begrudge her that. 

What Stiles did begrudge her? The part that really pissed him off? Well, that was when she locked two teenagers—her friends, damn it—up in her creeper basement and turned her back. That was it, really. She could have held the cane and beat him. She could have plugged the current in herself, but she didn’t. She half assed both sides, and because of that, Stiles blamed her. 

“You can’t seriously blame her for any of this,” Scott said, voice rising as he did. Stiles let him rage, and as his best friend slammed the door behind him, the window popped open. 

Sharp, green eyes flickered from the door to the bed and back again, and after a moment, Derek eased himself up over the ledge. 

“Dude, do you like...jump from the ground floor?” 

“Off the roof,” Derek amended, and leaned against the wall. “Scott means well. He’s—”

“Thinking with his dick. I got it.” 

“He’s sixteen,” Derek offered with a shrug. “A lot of boys can’t think with anything else.” 

Stiles carefully doesn’t ask if Derek ever thought with something other than his brain. Gerard and ranted enough that Stiles could put together puzzle pieces well enough. Instead, he studied the wall across from him, mind running a mile a minute and ready to get out of the hospital.

He was lost in debating an escape attempt when a small lightweight box lands in his lap. Raising an eyebrow at the wolf, he tugs the top off. A leather strap sits inside, the same style he’d worn before only this one was new. There were none of the sweat stains along the edges, none of the places where he’d gnawed on it in nervous tension. 

“For when that comes off,” Derek said simply, gesturing at the layer of gauze around Stiles’s wrist. It is simultaneously thoughtful and heart wrenching. “Yours was taken as evidence. I know the importance of keeping weaknesses secret.” 

“Can’t read it anyway.” 

“Doesn’t mean someone won’t try.” Stiles wonders if it is Derek’s turn to carefully not say: you’ll be asked fewer questions about a hidden soulmark than you will a destroyed one. If it is, Stiles takes the offered silence.

#

The Alpha Pack hit them hard and fast and leave them on their ass, scrambling for ground. Stiles was only out of the hospital a week before she spills the beans. 

“You have plans for the full moon?” she asked, sitting in his desk chair and spinning it around lazily. 

“Scott wants to run,” Stiles said. He’d never run with the wolf before, but after their fight two weeks ago, the offer was an olive branch. Stiles wasn’t going to let it go easily. Besides, if there was one thing Gerard Argent taught him it was that he wasn’t strong enough to run with humans, let alone wolves. He’d have to learn. 

“Maybe you want to stay in tonight,” she said, carefully not looking at him. “Maybe he wants to go, maybe he doesn’t, but I think you want to stay in.” 

“I can’t not go with him,” he said. “This is the first time we’ve talked in two weeks—”

“Then keep him here.” She considers for a moment. “Better yet, his control has been shit at school this week. Let Derek lock him up.” 

“His control?” Because this was the first Stile was hearing about any of that shit, and he was sick and tired of trying to convince Scott he needed the help.

“Derek says he’s struggling with his anchor with Allison and everything. Isaac had to throw him in the showers after practice last week.” 

“And you’re worried he’s going to eat all the fluffy bunnies before you get to them?” he asked, carefully not looking in her direction. She’d know, but then again, she seemed to always know anymore. 

“Something like that.” 

In the end, Stiles faked being too tired and achy to go run, which wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility given the colors of his rib cage. In the end, Scott was grabbed by the Alpha Pack, and Stiles? 

Yeah.

#

Ribs aching, wrist throbbing, and a Cure song playing drum beats in his temples, Stiles stood in the middle of a clearing in the Preserve, staring at a woman at least ten years his senior. She was a carefree, careless creature, posturing and suave in the way Kate Argent had been. 

It made his blood boil hot in his veins. 

“Little boy, all lost in the woods,” she purred, prowling forward a step. “You smell like wolves.” 

“You pick up on that, did you?” he asked. It wasn’t as difficult as it should have been, to stand his ground as an alpha werewolf stepped into his personal space. Something about the last few weeks, about the loss of his mark and the realization that a wolf was his soulmate—if not the other way around, made him bolder. It was a call to challenge, a call to step up, and the bitch had taken Scott. Scott, if nothing else, was his person to tie up to a radiator and leave on the full moon. Like she’d tied him to the tree behind her. He was unconscious, but his forehead was drawn as if in pain, even in sleep. He was alive at least. 

“I did,” she said. “Just like I picked up on your skittering little rabbit heart. Run away little rabbit.” She came closer still, close enough now that he was tense and ready for the last few steps. 

He reaffirmed the grip on his lacrosse stick, careful with the way he held it. The adjustments he’d made wouldn’t hold up if he fucked things up now. 

“I’m starting to think you’re going to have to make me.” 

Her smile turned feral, and just like every wolf he’d seen attack someone they thought was beneath him, she leapt forward, hands outstretched, feet free of the ground and any form of leverage. He flipped the lacrosse stick, the heavy netting falling away from a sharp wooden spike he’d carved into the handle. She couldn’t stop her momentum from carrying her forward, into the weapon. 

Impaled, the shaft protruding from her chest, blood bubbled past her lips. She smiled, feral and wild, and as her hand closed around the stick, she screamed. 

“Wolfsbane,” he said simply. “It’s rubbed into the grain of the wood.” 

She fell to her knees, the poison starting through her system fast and quick. He watched her fall and figured, if he couldn’t drive Gerard Argent’s cane through the fucker’s chest, at least he could kill an alpha. 

#

“What were you thinking?” 

The roar came unbidden but not completely unexpected. Derek paced the length of the veterinarian’s back office with wide, wild strides, red eyes flashing here and there as he looked from Stiles to Scott to Deaton. 

Scott was still unconscious—concussed but nothing the werewolf healing wouldn’t take care of in a day—on the examination table. Stiles considered Derek’s anger for a moment before smiling. His smile was his only shield lately, and it was one he wasn’t willing to let go of just yet. 

“I was thinking my best friend needed me.” 

“You’re a human, Stiles,” Derek said, advancing. “A squishy, killable, human. Don’t you get that?” 

“Did you just use a gaming reference?” 

“Stiles handled himself admirably,” Deaton offered. “We discussed the wolfsbane before he left.”

“You let him do this?” Derek asked, rounding on the veterinarian. Deaton only stood there, face impassive and open, and Derek growled under his breath as he stalked from the office. 

“He’s worried,” Deaton offered after he’d gone. 

“He’s a control freak.”

The veterinarian smiled slightly but did not argue. 

#

He sees through his lips and talks through his eyes, but— 

He sees through his— 

He can’t see, can’t speak, can’t scream, and he smiles. He smiles and he postures and he plots. 

He reaches a step forward and takes a hand out— 

No. No, he comes closer and he turns away, but he can’t. He can’t and he won’t and he does. 

#

He hasn’t taken a shower in four days. He hasn’t gone to school, hasn’t gotten out of bed, hasn’t done more than sip from the odd bottle of water on his night stand and consider everything he’s ever done. 

Vaguely, he wonders if his father will let him lay in his bed and die. He knows better, knows his father loves him, wouldn’t want him hurting let alone gone, but this is something far deeper than any fatherly affection. This is something he’d done, something he couldn’t take back. 

He takes a swig from the water bottle because his throat feels tight and hot, and he rolls onto his side away from the sunlight coming through the window, and he buries his head in his blankets. 

#

He hasn’t taken a shower in a week. He hasn’t considered the growing pile of makeup work on his desk, hasn’t had anything to eat in just as long. He feels hollow in his abdomen, as hollow as he feels through the rest of him. 

A human body can go up to three weeks without food. Sitting in his bed, feeling his muscles atrophy and his body start to sag inward, he wonders if he’d make it that long if he just didn’t get out of bed. Afterall, there was still a death penalty in California. 

His judge, jury, and executioner all agree — he was damned from the moment he didn’t close that door. 

#

He hasn’t taken a shower in nine days when Derek Hale barges in through the bedroom door, throws his blankets on the floor despite his protesting, takes one look at him, and flashes his eyes with alpha red. 

“Get up,” Derek demands, shoulders squared, jaw clenched against the words, the angered edge to them. His hands clench and unclench, and Stiles watches them with vague, distant curiosity. 

“No.” 

“You’ve got your dad on suicide watch. Is that what you want? Get your ass out of bed.” He isn’t given a chance to protest because Derek is hauling him up by his armpits and making him stand on shaky legs that haven’t supported his eight in a week and a half. 

Coma patients can’t so much as stand when they wake up. Stiles sort of wonders how their bodies don’t just collapse in on themselves with how he feels. Derek leaves him shakily supporting himself on the sink to start the shower, and Stiles nearly doesn’t make it before a shoulder is back beneath his, easing him upright. 

“Easy. I’ve got you.” 

Something shifts behind them in the bedroom, and Stiles has only enough energy to glance over his shoulder, head nearly lolling into Derek’s. Isaac is standing in his bedroom, one hand holding a garbage bag and another fishing trash off of the floor. Erica is stripping his bed down, and Boyd is directing Lydia to do something to his windowsill. 

“Leave that—”

“No.” Derek shoved him forward into the shower, careful to catch him before he tripped on the side of the bathtub. “You get your mountain ash back when your father doesn’t call Deaton asking if whatever you did could make you suicidal.” 

“M’not going to kill myself.” The water was warm and welcome, even through the layer of his sweat pants and t-shirt. He groaned and pressed his head against the cool tile. 

“Yeah, I know,” Derek said. “Can you stand long enough to shower or…”

“I’ll sit down before I fall down.” 

Stiles reached out with a shaking hand and tugged the curtain closed. Carefully, he pulled his sodden t-shirt and sweats off, tossing them out onto the floor. Halfway through the process, he’d given up on standing and fell in a graceful heap to the bottom of the tub. 

“You alright?” Isaac’s voice called through the curtain, and Stiles startled. Normally, he could at least hear when one of the wolves left the room, but over the shower and the rushing in his head from being upright, he’d missed Derek and Isaac switching places. 

“Fine.” 

The water started running cold sooner than he would have liked, and as the water cooled, he couldn’t stand sitting under it against the cold porcelain. Thrusting his arm out through the curtain, he called, “Isaac, can I get a—” 

Someone on the other side grabbed his wrist, turned it deftly upward, the ruin of his soulmark and the scarring there on open display. 

#

Derek Hale had decided a long time ago that his soulmate, whoever Mieczyslaw had been, was better off without him. A wolf with alpha eyes and a pack that didn’t want to hold together for more than a handful of weeks before crisis brought them back, he wasn’t worth the trouble. 

Sometimes, he looked down at the blank expanse of his wrist and swore he could see the name still there. It ached deep in his chest where it had ached after Paige and Kate and the fire and Laura. That pain had eased, quenched by time and made less sharp. 

Sitting in the little bathroom, listening to Stiles fighting his own limbs, his mind wandered. Despite his best efforts, his mind often wandered to Mieczyslaw, the person fate decreed would be by his side until their last days. More and more, the person in his head took shape in an all too familiar way. 

“Isaac, can I get a—”

Derek caught the flailing hand before it smacked him in the face. There, against the pale expanse of Stiles’s wrist, was the destroyed mark that meant Stiles had sacrificed proof of his soulmate for Derek’s pack. He had kept his silence and taken a beating for his pack. He had torn his own wrist open, his own mark half off, to protect Erica and Boyd. He had faced down an alpha. 

Mieczyslaw, Derek occasionally caught himself thinking, would have done those things. In the space between thought and reality, he considered the scarred over remains of a soulmark. It was a fairly short name there, only five letters long, and—

He dropped the hand and back pedalled off the closed toilet seat, leaving the bathroom and jumping out the newly werewolf accessible window before any of the pack could call after him. 

He didn’t know why he ran, not really. Stiles Stilinski was surely short for something, but it wouldn’t be Mieczyslaw. His soulmate, the one oddly shaping into something lanky but strong, sweet lipped but foul tongued, couldn’t be Stiles Stilinski if only because his name wasn’t Mieczyslaw. 

The name was gone, burned from his skin, and even if it was Stiles, even if, he had no way to prove it, no way to saddle a human teenager with his baggage. 

The question became: did he want to anyway? 

#

Depression was a hell of a thing. Once you had it, once you knew how it could play havoc with the world around you, you were doubly as likely to fall into it again. And Stiles? 

Stiles pretty much just figured fuck that. He’d get through whatever with sheer force of will and a determined streak that lead him into more trouble than good as a child. If Scott wanted an army of do-gooder heroes that walked through life giving the enemy every benefit of every doubt, he could have them. Stiles planned on surviving Beacon Hills, thank you very much. 

Except, when your father is torn between the good of a town and your own well being, when lying to him had become second nature, as easy as breathing, when he was all you had in a world spiraling out of control...When your mother was dead, and it was—

Your fault, Stiles. 

Your fault, Mieczyslaw.

It’s all your fault, Mischief. 

“Shut up!” he shouted, spinning in a little circle in his room, eyes searching for the thing whispering in his ear. Except, the nogitsune was long gone. Now, it was his own mind, his own psychosis working its way through his senses. “Jesus, Stiles. Come on.” 

He shook his head, squared his shoulders, and stared down unflinchingly at the scarred name on his wrist. In the last few months, he’d taken to wearing it openly. At first, there had been hushed whispers in the school hallways, pointed looks and carefully hidden gestures. 

There were some open comments, jeers about how his soulmate must have tried to rip his name off his skin when he saw it. Stiles just smiled because the ruination of his wrist was the only good thing he’d ever done. Erica and Boyd were alive because of what he’d done. Derek’s pack was alive and whole and roaming the backwoods of somewhere east of Beacon Hills. Sometimes, Stiles still got phone calls from Erica, texts from Isaac and Boyd, the odd question about his safety from Derek. 

Somedays, it felt like his pack was gone. Somedays, it felt like he just hadn’t gone with them. 

#

There was an aching absence in his soul, something so vacant and real that it made him hurt. For three weeks he tried to find what had caused it, three weeks until Isaac mentioned he’d gotten a text after he’d finally — and Jesus, Isaac, how can you go without a phone for three weeks? — from someone saved in his phone as Stiles. Except, when he looked through the contacts, there was no one under that name. 

Except, when Derek thought about it, when he said the name, it was familiar off of his tongue, awkward in a very well known way. He could feel it, rolling out of his throat before he even said it, knew it would come out as half a growl in the way most didn’t anymore. 

“Stiles,” Erica repeated, her face screwed up in concentration. “I...know a Stiles? She stared down at her wrist, where Boyd’s name was tattooed there for the rest of her life. She rubbed the top half of her mark like it would tell her something.

The text was worrying, when Isaac read it aloud, and Derek didn’t think twice about turning the Pack back toward Beacon Hills. 

#

Being forgotten wasn’t so terrible, not really. His father had a few weeks with his wife. His friends...they weren’t damaged so much as they were confused by his absence, and if his existence, the very core of him meant his father would live the rest of his life without his wife…

There isn’t a lot he can do about any of it except smile and carry on planning, planning for an eventuality that means all his plans are useless. 

#

The memory of Stiles Stilinski hit him hard in the chest ten miles outside of Beacon Hills. Loud mouthed and cocky, self-depreciating and depressed. Derek had run from that memory once, but the absence of it, the sharp ache of its disappearance and the reality that it could have been gone forever, made his wolf growl low and threatening in his chest. It made the man scream, knees in the dirt, head thrown back as pain and loss and agony ripped through him briefly and was gone. 

The open plain gave way to the preserve gave way to the town, and Derek was perched on a porch roof, hands gripping a window sill like it was a lifeline. He was only there a handful of moments before the window burst open and a gun was leveled at his chest. The faint smell of wolfsbane should have scared him more than it did. 

“Derek!” 

The gun dropped, gone back into the shadow of the bedroom, and a moment later, a bedside light came on, bathing the room in a soft, filtered light. 

Stiles didn’t look how Derek remembered in the rush of everything that poured into his mind, but he hadn’t seen him in the better part of a year and a half. He was taller now, stretched thin and slim. There were shadows under his eyes that reminded Derek sharply of a creature using Stiles’s body to prowl around him. 

“Stiles?” 

“Get off the roof, big guy.” 

He climbed through the window, careful of a scattering of books beneath it. College tombs book marked and dog eared and thoroughly ravaged in the way Stiles had always done. The room was the organized chaos of a man who knew exactly where everything was even if no one else could find a thing. 

“What happened?” Derek asked, trying to keep his voice from a growl. 

“What happened to what?” 

“You were gone!” Derek snarled, pressing forward and shoving Stiles hard into the wall beside the window. “You were gone, and none of us even knew it. What happened?” 

The weight of the story was staggering. Stiles had been gone. Peter had been gone. Did Derek even know that Peter was there one minute, gone the next, rinse, repeat? Had any of them known? Would any of them had known if they simply had never come back? If Peter and Stiles and everyone else had been gone for good? 

His legs shook, and he sat down hard on the newly cleared desk chair, sinking his head into his hands, scrubbing the tips into his hair. 

“Hey,” Stiles said, still standing in front of him, hovering, like he didn’t know how he’d be received. “It’s all good, taken care of, man.” 

The hand at Derek’s shoulder was light and hesitant. A left hand. Derek captured that hand and turned it over, inspecting the ruination of his name there. His fingertips shook as he traced the tops of the letters, finishing them as they should be. 

“I like it better this way,” Stiles said, voice carefully neutral. 

“Why?” 

“Because my soulmate would have to be someone...strong to deal with the world I live in. Strong people have scars.” 

“Unless they’re wolves.” 

“Unless they’re wolves.” 

Derek released the ruined wrist, a faint tingling in his fingers as he undid the cuff. Hyperventilation, he realized, as his breath fell against his own skin shakily. He held his breath as he turned his wrist over for inspection. 

Mieczyslaw was inked, clean and clear, into his skin. It had taken the better part of two weeks with a blow torch and an iron and more swearing than he’d ever done. The uptick of a heart rate and the faintest inhalation was all the reaction Stiles offered. If Derek had been a human, he would have covered his wrist and fled. If Derek had been a human, Stiles wouldn’t have been in a basement, tortured for keeping his silence about a wolf pack. If Derek had been a human, he wouldn’t have survived until now. 

As it was, Derek Hale was a born wolf of the Hale pack. He was an alpha, and his senses could pick up a few extra heart beats and a quickened breath. As it was… well. 

It was at it was. 

“Teach me how to say it.” 

“Just call me Mischief,” Stiles said, a small smile on his face. “It’s the only name that’s ever mattered.” 

“It suits you.” 

“It does.” 

#

Stiles never knew Derek had his name removed. Derek liked to think it wouldn’t have mattered. Afterall, he’d chosen to put it back. He’d chosen the final name on his wrist, and that was more important than anything else. 

Derek lived up to his scarred name. The Beacon Hills Hale Pack was fierce and whole and hearty, just the five of them. As the years stretched on, as strength grew and as fears of the lingering whispers in his head faded, Stiles became his namesake. The nogitsune, after all, had used what was within Stiles to cause its own chaos. There was always that spark of possibility hidden within him. And Mieczyslaw? Mischief? Well, he was alright with that.


End file.
